Hegemony in the Blue Current
On January 25, 2025, a bill called the Boosting Long-Term US Engagement in the Pacific Act, or BLUE Pacific Act, was reintroduced for the third time since 2020 by Democratic Congressman Ed Case of the State of Hawaii. Under a veneer of North-South partnership, regional capacity building, and climate resilience, its main objective is to reinforce US national security interests in the Pacific. Examples of this include expansion of International Law Enforcement Academies in the Pacific and developing media and journalism training to codify Indo-Pacific content sharing agreements. The bill is a softened, humanitarian, response to hardline right-wing approaches to US national security. Bill co-sponsor and fellow Hawaii Democratic Congresswoman Jill Tokuda states, “Deterring aggression in the Indo-Pacific and restoring America’s leadership on the global stage – as President Trump has declared in his ‘America First’ agenda – means more than just putting our interests above everyone else’s.”
The bill is one among many transoceanic partnerships using “blue” environmental rhetoric to expand and embolden the US security state. This “blue current” – or the contemporary use of blue rhetoric in ocean governance, climate adaptation and mitigation, and processes of militarization and securitization – is much like an ocean surface current, guided by shifting winds of geopolitical and geoeconomic competition. The BLUE Pacific Act is part of the US’s broader constellation of Pacific militarization and economic development known as Indo-Pacific Strategy. The bill would bolster US hegemony beyond Pacific societies and spaces where it already has a stronghold. Hegemony is a form of social control attained through dominant powers negotiating with less powerful actors to convince them into acquiescing to the dominant power structure. It is an ongoing and contested process of domination and struggle rather than a stable structure.
The Pacific as Technofrontier
The Pacific has once again become a focal point for global superpowers to exercise hegemonic politics, as with the so-called “New Cold War” between the US and China. Since World War II, the Pacific has been viewed by global superpowers as a technofrontier. Anna Tsing described technofrontiers as spaces where developing industrial technologies are tested and perfected to extract resources and expand territory to accomplish global capitalism’s drive for primitive accumulation. The Pacific is the largest body on the planet and shares coastlines with many nations. As a technofrontier, it is a crucial space where hegemons try to shore up strategic economic and security interests. Vying to dominate the terms of cultivating, exploiting, and controlling the Pacific technofrontier requires localized concession and participation. Current US-China competition stages the Pacific as a site for domination through gaining Pacific states’ approval through programs framed in the development paradigm of blue economy.
In pursuit of this, the neoliberal order of the last several decades has co-opted Native Pacific ways of knowing and being in relationship with the environment into marketable slogans. Native Pacific Islanders view the ocean as a space of world enlargement and connection. This was famously advanced in Tongan anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa’s (1994) work Our Sea of Islands, which envisions Pacific societies as connected by the sea rather than disparately scattered across an empty expanse. States, corporations, NGOs, and development contractors have marketized this concept through widespread use of “blue” rhetoric in policy, multilateral partnerships, and development programs.
Such uses of hegemonic environmental discourse constitutes the making and assertion of blue hegemonies, or the “collective forces upholding and extending uneven forms of power through the rhetoric of blue ocean materiality” (forthcoming, Padgett 2025). As Sharad Chari argues in Gramsci at Sea (2023), marine environments are exposed to an immense scale of hegemonic politics where dominant powers attempt to bring order through legal, administrative, and military means. While growing tensions between the US and China re-focus the Pacific as a site of contingency and struggle for Pacific Islanders who live there, resistance to blue hegemonic politics is as important as ever to the aims of environmental justice and equitable international relations in the Pacific. But the legitimizing framework of blue economy currently constrains terms of diplomatic discussion to perceiving the ocean as a space of resourcefulness in capital financialization and of imperialist expansion.
Blue Economy in the Pacific Technofrontier
Blue economy is a form of ocean governance championed by international entities such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, United Nations (UN), and global powers investing in oceanic capital accumulation. Blue economy presents the ocean as an abstract space to exercise techno-solutionism and innovation, maximizing economic growth – or blue growth – from marine resources referred to as “blue natural capital.” Projects conceived within the terminologies of blue economy and blue growth focus on industries like blue carbon capture, offshore wind, seabed mining, fisheries, aquaculture, and similar technologies to maximize “sustainable” capital accumulation from the ocean.
Recent years have seen heavy promotion of blue economy as central to the consolidation ocean governance in multilateral partnerships. For example, the UN and partner organizations declared 2020-2030 as “The Ocean Decade,” an effort to ostensibly communicate ocean science in exciting ways to the global publics towards improved ocean resource stewardship. Much of the work of The Ocean Decade is conceived within the terms of blue economy. One UN article expressly refers to the ocean as “the next great economic frontier,” linking blue economy to both conservation and exploitation of oceanic environments. Treating the ocean as an infinite space of resourcefulness for market-based solutions to the climate crisis, the blue economy approach neglects delicate balance of marine ecological health and how destructive practices negatively impact a wider ecology of human-non-human relations.
As Timothy Clark and Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor (2024) argue, blue economy does not attempt to amend historical injustices of oceanic states’ incorporation into the world economy through colonialism and imperial rule. While blue economy is associated with regional capacity building, evidence suggests a continuation of asymmetrical power dynamics that extend superpowers’ hegemony. The 2025 iteration of the BLUE Pacific Act promotes the Pacific Islands Forum’s (PIF) 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent, a diplomatic and development agenda largely oriented towards climate resilience. But the bill emerged in a context where US discourses of China deterrence undergird all its actions in the region: “This measure will greatly strengthen both our economic and national security, especially as we tackle the growing challenges posed by China throughout our Indo-Pacific,” says Ed Case. With “our Indo-Pacific,” Case reduces the Pacific Ocean and Pacific states to a blank blue canvas upon which to inscribe US identity, territorialism, sense of place, and security.
Blue Geocultural Power
The use of environmental rhetoric by states and corporations granted state permissions reveals how culture plays a central role in mediating the narrative of land grabs, water grabs, and conservation efforts. It discursively and materially transmits a vision of an American Pacific, or an expansive and expanding oceanic security state (Na’puti and Frain 2023). Hegemonic power competition is always more than geopolitical and geoeconomic. It is also a geocultural process, or one that communicates values and ideas for what it means to be part of the global order. In Ali Kadri’s (2023) terms, blue hegemonies are an expression of “capital’s cultural arsenal” (146).
Supporters of the BLUE Pacific Act continuously reference US adversaries in its conception of the Pacific and to argue for a US role in it. A document outlining the bill states that the exclusive economic zones of the Pacific Islands region “cover more of the Earth’s surface than the land areas of China and Russia combined.” It is precisely because of the capaciousness of the Pacific region – and its Chinese and Russian shorelines – that the US is entrenched in hegemonic blue rhetoric. This rhetoric offers strategic utility to legitimize imperial investment. This is often done through creating bilateral and multilateral agreements which signal “shared values” and “shared futures” with Pacific states but do not meaningfully consult with them. Blue hegemonies overwrite ways that Pacific Islanders have been in relationship with changing environments for centuries, as well as emplaced resistance to forces of militarization, nuclearization, and forms of conservation-as-control.
These rhetorical devices are more than projections of abstract imaginaries. They involve material land and water grabs, and this pattern is not new. After World War II, many US commentators referred to the region of Micronesia as “America’s Lake in the Pacific” due to the strong presence of US governance and development of US-style civic institutions. Its islands were conceived as militarized steppingstones to the Communist Bloc during the Cold War. The contemporary “Pacific Pathway” in the Mariana Islands relies on blue conservationism to create Marine Protected Areas where the US military tests weapons while also privatizing and militarizing exclusive economic zones. The US also competes with China for permissions to Pacific harbors and ports. Political and economic blue hegemonies disarticulate the ocean from the power and agency of place and from material struggles over both land and water. US development of military infrastructure on Pacific islands, including nuclear and chemical storage, dispossesses Islanders from ancestral places of relation. In recent years, US Indo-Pacific Forces have sought to redevelop and expand dilapidated World War II era military infrastructures across Micronesia in preparation for the possibility of armed conflict (Everstine, 2020). Apart from vague notions of shared values with Pacific states deemed allies of Western liberalism, island place relations and processes of dispossession are obscured in the currents of blue rhetoric.
Against the Blue Current
As tensions increase between the US and China and as the climate crisis intensifies, blue hegemonies are central to imagining and creating different visions of Pacific futures. Formations like the PIF’s Blue Pacific Continent could be a useful way to assert regional identity and garner concessions for climate crisis adaptation, since mitigation is at this point largely unobtainable. But it is also unclear yet whether the terminology of “Blue Pacific Continent” circulates at localized levels where the sea is a more common interpretive mode for sense of place. The “blue current” circulates at shallow levels atop the deep water currents of Pacific relationality and practices of counterhegemony.
Foundations laid by blue hegemonic rhetoric are resulting in emboldened imperialist practices. Following the second inauguration of Republican President Donald Trump, the US began signaling overt intention towards settler militarist land and water grabs, as with its drive to possess Greenland and rename it “Red, White and Blueland” and in renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” (known as Chactemal in Mayan and Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl in Nahuatl). These events geoculturally transmit intangible notions of US national culture and identity by asserting settler frontier heritage and entitlement.
In this ecology of international relations, is important not to get lost in shallow notions of expansiveness. Going against the blue current involves attunement to how environmental rhetoric shapes hegemonic political attitudes and agendas. It necessitates support of environmental justice work that emerges from places and communities affected by blue hegemonies. Following Pacific Islander scholar and activists, this can be done by contracting like oceanic currents and tides back to the point where the geocultural power of oceanic world enlargement originates: from positions of local and specific situatedness.
References
Chari, Sharad. 2023. Gramsci at Sea. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Clark, Tim P., and Andrés M. Cisneros-Montemayor. 2024. “Colonialism and the Blue Economy: Confronting Historical Legacies to Enable Equitable Ocean Development.” Ecology and Society 29(3). doi: 10.5751/ES-15122-290304.
Hau’ofa, Epeli. 1994. “Our Sea of Islands.” The Contemporary Pacific 6(1):148–61.
Kadri, Ali. 2023. The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.
Na’puti, Tiara R., and Sylvia C. Frain. 2023. “Indigenous Environmental Perspectives: Challenging the Oceanic Security State.” Security Dialogue 54(2):115–36.
Padgett, Aaron. 2025 (forthcoming). “Blue Hegemonies: Confluences of Geocultural Power in the Pacific.” Pacific Asia Inquiry 15 (Fanuchånan).